Quote Originally Posted by Connor View Post
In my opinion it’s the encounter design that’s the main problem. Not the only problem, but the root cause. If we actually had a reason to use our healing gcds healers would feel much less ‘spammy’ and brainless.

That said, the problem there is that if they made healing requirements so high that healers had to use every single tool in their kit, those requirements would have to become astronomically high because they keep giving us so many overpowered off-cool-down abilities.
Agreed. Not only is every bit of damage scripted, but fight mechanics are very punishing if you fail them. The general sense I get from FF14's encounter design is that the dev team really, really, super-duper does not want healers to be able to compensate for failed mechanics. That's why so damn many mechanics are one-shots or "this must be done perfectly by all 8 party members or it's a wipe" mechanics (think the meteors in SoSEX). Look at the first boss of Breach, back in ShB: the big telegraphed beam is a one-shot, the other major mechanic yeets you off the platform if you're not hugging a cube.

If I had to describe healing, and to a lesser extent, tanking, in FF14 right now, I'd call it perfunctory. You're just going through the motions. You're a healer/tank because this is an MMO and MMOs have healers/tanks. What you actually do most of the time is DPS in both cases, and just hit one of your "Role oGCDs" every 30-60 seconds as needed. At this point, the roles exist just because it's a genre convention that they exist.

A good healer should be able to pull their party through failed mechanics and compensate for mistakes. That is the traditional purpose of healers in MMOs. But Square doesn't want players to clear fights without perfectly AAAing Max300 executing the mechanics.